Posted
by
kdawson
on Saturday November 14, 2009 @03:25PM
from the into-the-bear's-lair dept.

AHuxley notes a series of YouTube videos that have gone viral in Russia, in which senior police officer Alexei Dymovsky — in full uniform — details police corruption and calls on Vladimir Putin to act. "[Dymovsky says:] 'Maybe you don't know about us, about simple cops, who live and work and love their work. I'm ready to tell you everything. I'm not scared of my own death. I will show you the life of cops in Russia, how it is lived, with all the corruption and all the rest – with ignorance, rudeness, recklessness, with honest officers killed because they have stupid bosses.' His series of three 2-to-7-minute long videos released over the past week have together garnered 1 million hits on YouTube, and have spread across Russia. Dymovsky was promptly fired after the clips spread across the Internet, and a local prosecutor has opened an investigation into libel. An interior ministry source accused him of working for foreign agents and hinted that the format of Dymovsky's complaint was a problem, using a medium that remains largely free of government control." It's best to visit the Global Post link with NoScript and Flashblock enabled. Here's a Google cache link in case it's needed.

Except, a ridiculous number of deaths and other shady activities have resulted from similar criticism under Putin (e.g., journalists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia#Under_Putin [wikipedia.org]) And of course, Ukrainian politicians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yushchenko#Dioxin_poisoning) and defectors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko#Illness_and_poisoning). This policeman's prosecution and/or death are imminent. . .

I dunno man, living on an entirely different continent, I am very concerned over my IP being logged by viewing a few damn YouTube videos from Russia. I better install Tor as well and go down to Starbucks with a brand new netbook, just in case.

No Script and Flashblock don't help if you're running flash anyway.

It's potentially more than the video, watching that using flash puts for all practical purposes a backdoor on the computers of an interesting group, especially those within Russia. Idiots that use flash and javascript are almost as bad as the ones that set up sites to depend on them for operation. Again, this is a case where using open standards would not just help get the message out but help protect the identities, interests, and machine integrity of those receiving the message.

I don't know what kind of lies they're teaching you, but that is just flat out wrong in every way.

Repressions and famines occurring in the Soviet Union under the regimes of Lenin and Stalin described in the Black Book of Communism include:

* the executions of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922 (See also: Red Terror)
* the Russian famine of 1921, which caused the death of 5 million people
* the extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920
* the murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps in the period between 1918 and 1930
* the Great Purge which killed almost 690,000 people
* the deportation of 2 million so-called "kulaks" from 1930 to 1932
* the deaths of 4 million Ukrainians (Holodomor) and 2 million others during the famine of 1932 and 1933
* the deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Moldavians and people from the Baltic Republics from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1945
* the deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941
* the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943
* the deportation of the Chechens in 1944
* the deportation of the Ingush in 1944.(p. 9-10) (See also: Population transfer in the Soviet Union)